A week ago it was my birthday. A week ago I turned thirty. As F. Scott Fitzgerald would say, I am standing before the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. Yes, I am pretentious enough to start out a post about my thirtieth birthday with a quote from the Great Gatsby. High five, lit nerds!
I would be lying if I said that I haven’t been thinking about this birthday. I mean, I haven’t been giving it a ton of though, and I certainly haven’t been agonizing over it or anything, but yeah. Thirty. I mean, it’s a milestone, right?
I’ve been thinking that things are good. I am mostly in a good place. And I can say with confidence that I am in a much better place than I was when I turned 20. I mean that both literally and figuratively – I spent my 20th birthday working in a cookie factory in Kitchener. I had to wear a hairnet and a mustard yellow smock. My fellow cookie workers bought me a fancy Tim Horton’s donut and stuck a candle in it.
This year I began my birthday celebrations with dinner and a movie with Matt (and sans bébé). We went out to a fancy restaurant, where I proceeded to prove myself to be the cheapest cheap drunk in the history of ever. I wore a fancy silk dress and my favourite necklace from Paris and we played bloody knuckles and laughed at penis jokes. Basically it was just the best. Then we saw Moonrise Kingdom, which was also basically the best. High five, Wes Anderson!
But anyway. I digress.
I am happier now. I am more confident. I am more comfortable in my own skin. My body is actually stronger, firmer and more flexible than it was 10 years ago. I like the way I look, which is a nice change from how I felt about my appearance a decade ago. And I have Matt. And Theo.
I might not be as naively, wondrously optimistic as I was at the beginning of my last decade. I still believe that the future is bright, although I am more cautious about it. I am better at living in the present than I have ever been, and that’s a huge relief.
There are things that I miss about the self I left behind a decade ago. I miss the sense of awe I had, the sense of wonder. I miss the sense of potential that I felt about myself. I miss the sense of potential I felt about life in general. There were so many blanks to be filled in back then. Now there are less. I am mostly happy with how I’ve filled those blanks. I think that’s the most that anyone can say.
And now there are new blanks to fill, ones I didn’t expect. There are new challenges, and new doors that have opened for me. If life is not as full of magic as I once thought, then it’s also far, far less terrible than I have believed at times.
This is good. Thirty is good. I am excited for this decade.
“So we drove on toward death in the cooling twilight.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
(this is what thirty looks like, in case you were wondering)
The Belle Jar 
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